Social Listening for Marketers by eMarketer

Social Listening for US Brands:

Deriving Actionable Insights from

Conversations

Jillian Ryan

Analyst

March 24, 2016

Made possible by

What Is Social Listening?

Listening is part of the larger social conversation

Social media exchanges

are part of a dialogue—a

“push” and a “pull”

Brands are comfortable and

familiar with the push

mechanism: marketing

The pull element, listening,

can add value through

insights extracted from

social conversations

Monitoring owned social channels

Social monitoring is passive

Brands track conversations

that directly reference a

brand, either with a tag or on

owned channels

Inbound social interactions are plentiful

Brands see a

higher ratio of

interactions on

Instagram and

Brands see

minimal

engagement

ratios on Twitter

Listening broadens the umbrella

Unlike monitoring, social

listening requires intent

Brands must expand beyond

owned properties and seek

out relevant social

conversations

Image Source: http://www.twigsdesigngroup.com/

The experts define social listening:

“Social listening is looking

for conversations

happening outside of

owned channels. You

can mine all of that

data on social

networks and blogs

for actionable

insights and

information.”

—James Cooper, Director,

Social Intelligence, ICUC

“Social listening offers a

comprehensive view of

interactions outside

what brands see by

monitoring to find

conversations beyond

the brand and uncover

what the world thinks broadly

about your products, industry

and competitors.”

—Chelsea Marti, Director, Strategy

and Services, Sprinklr

Is Anybody Listening?

Two 2015 surveys indicated that half of

marketers used social listening

used social insights

to make informed

decisions

(Source: Altimeter Group, Q2 2015)

49%used social listening

to understand

customers,

prospects and

markets

(Source: CMO Council, Q4 2015)

Brands have

doubts about

social listening’s

effectiveness

Across seven

industries,

worldwide say

social

listening fails

to generate

the greatest

stakeholder

return

Brands are

also unsure

actionable

social data is

Social listening data becomes actionable when it

answers a specific question

“Instead of saying, ‘Tell me everything every time

the word X appears on any social networks,’

companies who employ social

listening need to be more micro in

their ask.”

—Erik Huddleston, CEO, TrendKite

Even with

this, social

listening

challenges

remain

Sifting through the noise of conversations and

operationalizing the data are also key struggles

“Brands can easily be overwhelmed by

the volume of conversations on social

media. How do you start to even decipher and

prioritize and decide what actually is influential

and make decisions?”

—Andrew Caravella, VP, Marketing, Sprout Social

9 Use Cases for Social

Listening

1. Optimizing Social

Messaging and Advertising

Using social data in

marketing

Listening can help optimize marketing messages

“You can’t perform good marketing if you

don’t know your customers, if you don’t listen

to how they react to all of your marketing.

And the way that you connect the dots really depends

on the maturity of the brand. The aim should be to

use social data in real time to adjust

marketing investments.”

—Loic Moisand, CEO, Synthesio

MasterCard optimizes messaging through social

listening

“It was beneficial to understand

how our messages were being

received and listen to how

refinements performed better.

Based on the information

we were hearing online,

we had a more positive

product launch.”

—Marcy Cohen, VP, Digital

Communications, MasterCard

2. Real-Time Marketing

The real-time reality of social media:

58% of US marketers responded to timely trends,

news and events on social media. (Source: Wayin, June 2015)

49% of US marketers believed real-time responses

should occur within minutes; 26% said seconds.

US marketers used real-time marketing tactics to

form customer relationships (56%), promote events

(55%) and increase engagement and reach (49%).

Allstate uses social listening in real time

“We’re always listening for important ‘first moments’ that

Allstate can celebrate with our social community. We’ll

analyze the conversations and use real-time

marketing to join in the broader cultural

moments while they’re happening.”

—Lizzie Schreier, Director, Digital Engagement, Allstate

3. Enabling Sales via

Social Selling

Brands can comb conversations to find buying cues

“Over the past few years, the notion of

social selling has emerged. Brands

are using social listening to

identify product-applicable

purchase signals, like, ‘I want,’ ‘I

am going to buy,’ ‘I need to buy,” etc.

They are also digging into buyer

targeting.”

—James Cooper, Director, Social

Intelligence, ICUC

Social cues are paired with CRM data for more

targeted selling

“Business-to-business companies are more

innovative in the ways they employ it and

layer it with third-party data. Their use cases,

especially on the sales side, are more interesting and

have a deeper business impact level. With B2B it is

less about your brand and more about your category

or industry.”

—Amber Naslund, SVP, Marketing, and Chief Evangelist,

Sysomos

Century 21 does regional sales enablement

through social listening

“We’re looking for these consumer triggers by

putting social listening’s toolset in the

hands of our affiliated real estate

sales professionals, who are on the ground

transacting the business. Conversations on

social can identify sales

opportunities.”

—Matt Gentile, Director, Social Media, Century 21

[Editor’s Note: Gentile has since become managing director at

IMG Digital Group.]

4. Influencer and Advocate

Targeting Through Personalization

The importance of personalization and social:

Half of marketing executives in North America

believe that personalized strategies are critical to

realizing greater revenue and profitability from

customer engagement. (Source: CMO Council, Q4 2015)

39% of marketers worldwide used Facebook ‘likes,’

Twitter follows and other social activity as historical

customer data for personalization. (Source: VB Insight, June 2015)

Starwood Resorts uses social listening for

loyalty program personalization

“We use social listening coupled

with the robust targeting

capabilities that the social

media channels have to

identity key influencers that are

talking about the program and

personalize our message to them to

grow the voice of SPG 100.”

—Keri La Ra, Director, Global Social Media

Strategy and Digital Compliance, Starwood

Hotels and Resorts Worldwide

5. Customer Service

Response time is key for brands …

75% of US internet

users use social

media to obtain

customer service

Nearly 54%

expected to receive

a response from a

company within an

… but companies aren’t meeting user expectations

Education was the

industry with the fastest

response time: 8.5 hours

Retail brands were the

most responsive overall,

replying to 21.7% of

customer social

interactions

Bad social customer service is bad business

“There is no return on ignoring customers.

In fact, that’s a negative return, so we need

social listening to find those conversations.

Plus, the cost of service for social customer support is

generally much lower than a call center.”

—Drew Neisser, Founder and CEO, Renegade LLC

Starwood Resorts has a global social listening

team scanning the web in 11 languages

“A few weeks ago a guest tweeted

that he forgot his belt at home.

To surprise and engage him,

we presented him with a belt

at check-in.”

—Michael English, SVP, Customer Contact

Centers and Electronic Distribution, Starwood

Hotels and Resorts Worldwide

6. Crisis and Reputation

Management

Social listening allows brands to see a mounting

crisis before it reaches a tipping point

“With social listening there are ways to

control and/or influence the origination

point.”

—Tim Hayden, VP, Marketing, Zignal Labs

Southwest Airlines uses social listening as an

early alert system

“In late 2015, we had a plane in Nashville

veer off of the taxiway after a safe landing.

Before our operational folks could get a

Southwest employee out to assess the

situation and damage, our social

listening team was able to show

them pictures that were coming

through customers on social media

who were sharing content.”

—Ashley Mainz, Social Business Manager,

Southwest Airlines

7. The New Focus Group

There are many advantages to doing social

listening for focus groups

“Focus groups are

dead. Brands can

glean product insights

out of social. The

unique psychographics

from social provides a

richer understanding of who

your customers are and

what they want.”

—Erik Huddleston, CEO,

TrendKite

“Focus groups are time

intensive, slow and

expensive. With social,

you can get all of

those insights from a

much broader

population almost in

real time, at a fraction

of the cost.”

—Brandon Andersen, Director of

Marketing, Cision

JetBlue Airways listens to amenities sentiment

“Social listening insights reaffirm theories

that we’ve had about our service

amenities, but also challenges and tests other

business strategies that might not be working.”

—Morgan Johnston, Manager, Corporate Communications,

JetBlue Airways

8. Benchmarking Competitors

and Industry Trends

Benchmarking against competitors is a healthy

success measure

The bigger the

company, the more

important to

understand what

competitors are

doing and how

users are talking

about them

Social listening

allows brands to

uncover what their

competitors are

doing, how they are

being received and

what the industry as

a whole looks like

from the social

sector

“Profiling conversations about

your competitors and their

products at a fine-grained level

with social listening can

help brands benchmark

areas where they have

made improvements or

where they have lost

ground in specific areas.”

—Mick Conroy, Head of Insights, ICUC

London (formerly Tempero)

Nissan uses social listening to track sentiment

around the auto industry

“This provides very clear brand

health mapping, so Nissan

knows in real time how they are

performing.”

—Loic Moisand, CEO, Synthesio

[Editor’s Note: Nissan is a Synthesio client.]

9. Guiding Rebranding

Social media is a testing ground for rebrands

“Through listening, companies can understand

what people are saying about a rebrand as

it happens, and then adjust any message.

Brands can also measure the impact and the noise

around a rebrand.”

—Matt Cordaro, Director, Customer Success, Hootsuite

3M Tracks reception of newly launched brand

identity

“From listening, we’re seeing from social

conversation based on public social data that

since the rebranding, 3M is actually

perceived as more science-driven, consistent

and disruptive. Our new branding reflects how people

perceive 3M.”

—Amy Lamparske, Head of Global Social Media, 3M

The Technology Behind

Social Listening: Today

and Tomorrow

Technology is the backbone of a social listening

strategy

Platforms are based on text

analytics with a crawler

capability that brings in

data and identifies

instances of those

keywords

Traditionally, this is done

through data science layers

on top of APIs and

custom-built algorithms

Finding the

right tool is a

big challenge

for brands

Technology hurdles remain

Sentiment

inaccuracies

The human

element vs.

automation

Walled gardens

Plans to invest

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